Eat This and Give Me a Shoutout
“Uh... thanks to you, I got out of there in one piece.”
At Cho-young's words as she trailed along behind, Hye-yeon glanced back over her shoulder, shaking the beer from her hands.
Does she not remember me?
It wasn't that contemptuous expression she'd worn the other day. Instead, she stood there fidgeting shyly, thanking her as if she were thanking a total stranger.
“You looked like you were in trouble.”
“I was! Very much in trouble!”
After all, she had gone from being a man to being a woman. A man's advances were the last thing she welcomed—if anything, they disgusted her.
Hye-yeon let out a long sigh as she watched Cho-young hauling a heavy flowerpot, a long stalk, a watering can, gardening gloves, and who knew what else, all without the slightest effort.
Her chest was being squashed flat against the enormous pot.
“You haven't been a Mender for long, have you?”
“Wh-what?”
“The only women who can carry that much weight around like it's nothing are Menders. You should hide it! It's not like every Mender out there is a good one, you know?”
Cho-young jolted in alarm and hastily set down the enormous pot and everything inside it.
“You're a Mender too?”
Cho-young went on guard.
To her, Menders were nothing but lunatics. Was the woman standing before her one of those lunatics as well?
“Whoa, whoa, no need to be so defensive! I gave up my absolute favorite beer just to raise your affection level, okay?!”
Affection level? As Cho-young puzzled over what that was supposed to mean, Hye-yeon went on.
“We've met before! You don't remember? The abandoned-house exploration stream!”
She did look vaguely familiar, but the memory wouldn't surface—until the words abandoned-house exploration made everything click.
Back then, Cho-young hadn't yet adjusted to this world, and with her grandmother's sole legacy—the field and the house—collapsed into ruins, her nerves had been strung tight.
“Oh! The trespasser!”
So this person was GhostCatchingShaman?
“...Trespasser isn't quite... well, maybe it is. Anyway, I'm sorry about back then. That place is a seriously famous abandoned house, you see.”
“My house?”
“Yeah. The owner never showed up for so long that the developers gave up on the neighborhood entirely. They were originally going to bulldoze the whole area and throw up apartment complexes, but some grandmother risked her very life to stand in the way, and that plan died too.”
Well, seeing as she'd been gone for sixty-two years, that did track. But who's this 'some grandmother' supposed to be?
Cho-young nodded as if convinced—then abruptly realized something rather important.
“W-wait, hold on. Famous abandoned house means... are there ghosts there too?”
Watching Cho-young press an arm over her chest with a frightened look, Hye-yeon laughed as though she found it adorable.
“Hard to say. We got thrown out on our ears that day, so I never got to confirm whether it's haunted or not.”
“Eep!”
“You really are a total newbie, huh? A Mender, scared of ghosts?”
“Being scared is perfectly natural!”
They were ghosts, of all things.
“Menders wield spiritual qi. Catching a ghost is as easy as snatching up a mouse.”
That part was news to her. The only Menders Cho-young had ever known were the ones in the game.
“Wow, guess you really are hearing all this for the first time?”
“I haven't been a Mender for very long.”
“It shows. Well, meeting like this must be fate. Want to head to a café and talk a little more?”
Cho-young blinked at her.
A woman this beautiful... is asking me?
It would have been unthinkable back when she was still a man. In his old life—living alone in Seoul, dragging himself to the office day after day before he inherited his grandmother's house—he'd been utterly unpopular; people said he seemed gloomy. His personality had always been slow and timid besides, and the workplace bullying had come quietly, inevitably. A woman's interest was something he had never once experienced.
Is it because I look like this now?
A pretty woman with a huge chest. That was where she stood in life now, Cho-young mused. So looks really were everything, huh?
“D-don't you want to?”
At Hye-yeon's tentative follow-up, asked with a faintly cowering expression, Cho-young waved both hands in frantic denial.
“N-no! I'd love to! I'm just not used to this sort of thing...”
“Used to what? Talking to people?”
“I'm not that much of a shut-in, thank you very much.”
“Then what?”
“It's just... when such a pretty woman wants to chat with me...”
Cho-young's face flushed red, and Hye-yeon shot back, utterly incredulous.
“You must have been wildly popular, though?”
“N-no, not at all.”
Cho-young smiled sheepishly and opened the crumpled canvas bag she'd brought along, stuffing the freshly purchased flowerpot and the rest inside it.
Hye-yeon, who had been quietly watching the whole thing, jolted in shock, her mouth falling open.
“Is that a—a Dusk Cane?”
“Hm? Ye-es. Weren't you the ones saying it'd be a hassle to lug around? So I'm just going to stash it all in here.”
“That must have cost a fortune. Business must be treating you well?”
“Ah...”
The truth was she'd gotten it for free. But Cho-young decided to let it stay expensive.
“Yep. Cost me an arm and a leg.”
Hye-yeon's eyes gleamed with twice the interest as she seized Cho-young's slender hand and tugged.
“Come on, let's go!”
Their first meeting had been a disaster, but Cho-young figured she was actually a rather good person. To think the xianxia world—crawling with nothing but lunatics—had someone like her in it. In a world where you earned a reputation for being 'good' simply by not murdering anyone, someone with an actually human personality ranked among the very best of the best.
Hye-yeon, meanwhile, was grinning an evil grin, thinking of nothing but spirit grass.
Inside the Starbooks café.
Countless Chromians packed the seats wall to wall.
Cho-young and Hye-yeon took a table by the window, ordered americanos, and each took a sip.
“Want to drop the formalities?”
Hye-yeon asked first, and Cho-young nodded with reddening cheeks.
“So it's Cheon Cho-young, then?”
“Yes... ah—I mean, yeah.”
“I'm Shin Hye-yeon. You can just call me Hye-yeon.”
“Mm. Hye...yeon.”
Perhaps because it had been so long since she'd last called a woman by her name, Cho-young's ears burned.
Watching her as though she were some fascinating curiosity, Hye-yeon asked,
“How did you open your spirit root?”
“Spirit root?”
Cho-young was caught in a dilemma over whether to tell the truth of everything that had happened to her. Even in a xianxia world with its broken power balance, common sense still existed here. Would anyone believe her if she said she'd tumbled into Biseungdo—which opened only once every thousand years—in a woman's body, been raised as livestock by a Changgui, barely escaped, and then dropped into Neo Korea in the year 2087, a full sixty-two years later? It was a story even Cho-young herself couldn't believe.
“I just... trained really hard.”
Flimsy excuses were all she could manage. Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—Hye-yeon didn't seem to care much. It had been nothing more than an icebreaker question.
“That's impressive. Opening a spirit root on a pureblood body, no less.”
“Pureblood?”
“People without cybernetic implants. That's what we call them.”
Answering Cho-young's question, Hye-yeon tilted her head.
“That's strange, though. How do you not know something this basic?”
“Ah, that, um. I did know it—the word just isn't familiar to me.”
“Are you from abroad?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Let's just leave it at that.
“Oh, I see.”
Hye-yeon just kept gnawing pointlessly on her straw. She needed to fire off the next question, but nothing suitable came to mind. Maybe I'll just ask that one, then?
“Are your boobs natural?”
Cho-young froze dead at the question.
Hye-yeon hastily waved her hands and rushed to add, “N-no, wait—that's not what I meant. I just couldn't believe my eyes, that's all...”
“I've never had surgery.”
“Wow... that size can happen naturally?”
“Well, um. I've been like this from the beginning...”
Silence fell once more. If anything, the breast question had only made things twice as awkward, and Hye-yeon mentally smacked her own head several times over. Then, for the first time, it was Cho-young who threw out a question of her own.
“You watch my stream, don't you?”
Hye-yeon swallowed hard—too hard. In her panic, the americano went down the wrong pipe.
“Khhk! Cough! Cough!”
“Are you okay?”
“Y-yeah, fine.”
“GhostCatchingShaman, right? I saw you drop Chrome Stones in my stream. Thank you.”
Well, of course she remembered—back then, Hye-yeon had thoughtfully introduced herself in person.
Hye-yeon looked at Cho-young with a grave, resolved expression and opened her mouth.
“That's right. The reason I approached you in the first place was...”
“The spirit grass?”
“...Yeah.”
Spirit grass was an exceedingly precious thing in this world. Say some Mender got their hands on it. Would they sell it, or take it themselves? It was a question that answered itself without a moment's thought—Hye-yeon wouldn't have passed it along to anyone else if it had been hers. Which was exactly why she had to tread so carefully. She belonged to a Dao sect that walked the righteous path and couldn't go around taking lives, yet there was nowhere else she could obtain spirit grass either. She had no intention of demanding it all. Just a little. Her plan was to beg, if she had to, to buy just one of the three.
“I'm sorry for approaching you with an agenda. But I've only got thirty years of life left, so... I was ready to bury my pride and beg you for it...”
“Here.”
Hye-yeon stared blankly for a moment at the round little something now resting on the table.
“...?”
“Take it.”
That, without a doubt, was a spirit pill. Wasn't a numinous aura steadily seeping up from it? Fitting her handle, GhostCatchingShaman, Hye-yeon was a former shaman—one who could see spiritual qi with her own two eyes. And to those eyes, the pill radiated an aura so staggering that a single glance was enough to make her hair stand on end.
Sensing something deeply off about Cho-young for laying out something so precious in the open, Hye-yeon shot her hand across the table and slapped it over the pill.
“Wh-what are you doing? Right now?”
“Hm?”
“You can't just flash something like this around!”
“I can't?”
What do you mean, 'can't'? Obviously—
“I've got more of these than I know what to do with.”
“Y-you have more?!”
“Want another one?”
Is she insane? No—no, hold on. Is she an angel?
“Why... why give it to me...”
She knows full well I approached her deliberately because I had my eye on the spirit grass. Doesn't she?
The reason that left Cho-young's lips was absurdly simple—and utterly important.
“Because you're the first friend I've made here.”
Cho-young, eyes downcast, fidgeting as she mumbled the words—there was no end to how adorable the sight was. The spirit grass might have been the reason Hye-yeon had sought her out, but right now, she genuinely found herself wanting to grow close. Mender to Mender.
“Oh, and one more thing.”
Cho-young swept Hye-yeon's hand aside and slid the spirit pill decisively across the table toward her.
Giving one away outright—and the price she named was a stream shoutout? Did she have any clue what her words were actually worth?
“Consider it an ad fee.”
Looking at Cho-young's radiant smile, Hye-yeon felt her shoulders sink and soften, as if they were melting away.
She's an angel. A genuine, bona fide angel.
Hye-yeon layered resolve upon resolve: no matter what happened, she would protect Cho-young. A shoutout? She'd give her one a hundred times over. And if any Menders ever came charging in with their sights set on Cho-young—
She'd kill every last one of them.